The Easel

23rd August 2022

Michael Heizer’s City, a vast art project in the Nevada desert 50 years in the making, will finally open to the public

Benjamin Sutton | The Art Newspaper | 20th August 2022

The land artist Michael Heizer has completed “City”, his “career-defining” 50-year project in the Nevada desert. It’s a mile and a half long, half a mile wide and consists of carefully smoothed dirt mounds, roads and depressions dotted with concrete structures. Reviewers are bowled over by its scale, variously comparing it to a Mayan site or an “unfinished highway interchange”. One critic calls it a “masterpiece”, adding that “like Mount Rushmore or the Hoover Dam, it is bravado, awesome and nuts.”

8 Questions on the Life + Work of Diego Rivera

Cristina Chan | SFMOMA | 17th July 2022

Rivera developed a modernist eye in Paris. Back in Mexico, though, his public murals were full of figurative imagery that celebrated indigenous culture and the nobility of rural workers. That work made him famous at home. Fame in the US arose from murals that embraced American industrial prowess. These odd juxtapositions might, if it were another artist, lead to accusations of propaganda. Rivera has somehow escaped that fate. He was, one critic writes, “a lighthouse of vitality”.

Art lovers, make your way to a tiny but perfect exhibition

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 1st August 2022

Dürer, although devoutly Catholic, fully absorbed the humanist spirit of the Renaissance. He was a “one man avant-garde” who helped Germany jettison its Gothic outlook. Moreover, he possessed the “ultimate” artistic skill of mark making, something his prints make plain. His woodblocks are “mighty impressive” but it is Dürer’s engravings that reveal his greatness – “conveying football fields of information with marks no bigger than a hyphen”.

Heart of glass: why the world fell in love with Lalique

Lucy Scovell | Christie’s | 17th August 2022

Establishing his own jewellery workshop before age 30, Lalique quickly became the “undisputed master of Art Nouveau jewellery”. In the early 1900’s he switched to glass, making intricately designed vases, perfume bottles and more. His glassworks in Alsace, an “epicentre” of French decorative arts, influenced the evolution of art deco. Improbably, Lalique conquered the seemingly contradictory roles of “avant-garde craftsman and industrialist”.  Images are here.

An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts architecture in New York City

Gordon Bock | Traditional Building | 12th March 2022

The Gilded Age (1860 to 1920) marked the American ascendancy. New York’s new elite, now wealthier than aristocratic Europe, wanted their houses and buildings to announce that. The resulting style – Beaux Arts – was the French architectural style “on steroids”, a classically inspired “mélange of eclectic forms and ornaments”. By WW1 the mood had changed, leaving New York with an architectural heritage that references an “American renaissance”.

Hockney’s Muse

Staff | phillips.com | 1st August 2022

A piece related to a forthcoming auction of Hockney’s work. Celia Birtwell has featured in Hockney’s portraiture for over five decades and they are close friends. Their closeness isn’t a problem for him – “knowing her [really well] makes it always slightly different”. Each sitting is an opportunity to portray character rather than draw her likeness. Their friendship doesn’t mean that she likes every work. She described a recent effort as “horrible” before adding, ruefully, “he sees you as you really are.”

16th August 2022

Käthe Kollwitz’s kitsch

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 16th August 2022

John Berger wrote of Kollwitz that just as “History was indifferent, she was caring”. Her art speaks eloquently of the inequalities of aristocratic Germany and the traumatic birth of its industrial society. Did she care too much, though, to the point where it made her art kitsch? At one stage, Germany’s art students were declaring ‘No more war, no more Kollwitz!

“One can begin to see what is so unsettling about Kollwitz’s pictures. Her pictures—with their suffering subjects —seem to deny that one could, or should, get any distance from the emotional impact of traumatic experiences. The pictures cry and scream and wail with no relent and no apology. Yet her pictures are unashamed of their earnestness.”

Issey Miyake – a conceptual fashion designer for the many

Noorin Khamisani | The Conversation | 10th August 2022

A 1991 commission for ballet costumes led Miyake to developing micro pleated textiles. They gave his clothes a sculptural quality, garments that held their own shape rather than following the shape of the wearer. That was radical for the era, made more so because his elegant, androgynous designs reflected a Japanese aesthetic. His creations blurred the distinction between art and fashion. Not that he considered it fashion – “fashion goes out of style too quickly. I don’t make fashion. I make clothes.”

The craft world Is undergoing a democratization

Shantay Robinson | Smithsonian Magazine | 6th June 2022

America’s pre-eminent craft museum is hosting a “massive” survey show. What does it say about the status of this collective art form? Some featured works – quilts, baskets, personal ornaments – have recognizable utility. But craft now goes much further, spanning a broader range of materials and creations. Says one critic, this show highlights that craft has “transcended its focus on technical mastery … and pushed to embrace contemporary concepts about identity and storytelling”.

Warrior and Attendants

James Singer | Daily Art Magazine | 15th August 2022

A London museum is the latest institution to restitute its Benin bronzes to Nigeria. Why are these artworks so highly acclaimed? Most were cast in brass or copper alloy, using complex metallurgical techniques. The refinement of the bronzes produced surpassed that of Renaissance works. Warrior and Attendants is regarded as a “masterpiece” and describes in intricate detail the social hierarchy of warrior society. It is held in New York where, it is claimed, it acts as “cultural ambassador”.

What if the ancient Greeks and Romans really had terrible taste?

Lauren Woodard | trends.crast.net | 11th August 2022

Ancient sculptures were originally brightly painted. Does this mean that modern painted replicas are preferable to the now bleached originals? This writer badly wants to avoid saying yes. Perhaps modern recreations don’t quite capture the original colours. Perhaps the ancients were “wrong” in their use of colour (!), or intended these works to be garish? Whatever your view on this debate, modern recreations certainly require us to “radically redefine our sense of the ancient world”.

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